


Solely for science, or You hold the cup!

by Kana_Go



Series: Russian to English translations [12]
Category: Da Vinci's Demons
Genre: Crack, Gen, Hand Jobs, Humor, M/M, Medical Kink, Mildly Dubious Consent, Pseudo-History
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 10:29:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18871363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kana_Go/pseuds/Kana_Go
Summary: Leonardo needs a volunteer for an experiment and Riario drops by really conveniently.





	Solely for science, or You hold the cup!

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Исключительно ради науки, или А ты держи чашечку!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14391477) by [Kana_Go](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kana_Go/pseuds/Kana_Go). 



> Thanks SO much to my amazing beta meridianrose for constant help with beta-reading!

When someone scratched on the door timidly, Leonardo said to himself firmly that he had got to stop with this opium smoking thing and didn’t go to open the door. (In fact he hadn’t touched a pipe for several months, he just felt too lazy to get off his chair). Then the door was emphatically knocked on. Leonardo complained to himself about insidious hallucinations and leaned diligently over the frog he was finishing dissecting. But when something banged on the door as if the hypothetical hallucinations had got desperate to draw his attention and armed themselves with a little battering ram, he had no other choice than to go and open the door after all.   

Outside there was a horse’s rump, black and glossy. It waved its long black tail and jumped slightly on its both hind legs ready to kick the door again. Or rather Leonardo who stood at the door. Fortunately for Leonardo, a command followed after which the horse’s rump waved its tail again and disappeared in the darkness. Leonardo shut the door hastily.  

There was a knock again. Being afraid of seeing the horse’s dangerous body parts anew, Leonardo opened the door reluctantly.

Behind the door there stood Girolamo Riario clad in a black coat, a black hat and black sunglasses.

“Hello, artista,” he said gleefully.

Leonardo closed the door. Because a gleeful Riario was like seventeen comets floating over three nuns during a solar eclipse. That is to say, not good. However, he barely took a couple of steps, heading from the door, when the blade of a sword slid through a gap between the boards and pricked him unerringly at the backside.

“Open the door!” Riario demanded. “Otherwise, I’ll call my horse back! By the way, he got really offended after that time you’d said he smelt bad!”

Rubbing his posterior, Leonardo opened the door again.

“I meant it in a figurative sense,” he explained. “Besides, it wasn’t about the horse.”

“Now it’s me who is offended,” Riario replied. “But I’ll probably forgive you if you ask me in.”

 “I’ll probably ask you in,” Leonardo parried, “if you tell me why the hell you can’t stay in Rome.”

Riario heaved a sigh.

“I behaved really badly and Uncle kicked me out of Rome,” he confessed. “He ordered me to make myself scarce and go to Florence, because all your people behave badly so with you guys here I won’t stand out and shame our household with my behavior. I got here, but I didn’t know where I should go so I came to you.”

“Humph…” Leonardo narrowed his eyes. “I don’t even know. When you behaved badly last time, it took us a week to bury all dead bodies.”

“I’ll be on my best behavior,” Riario promised quickly.

“If you say so…” Leonardo said slowly, but then he held out his hand in a lightning-like move and whipped away Riario’s sunglasses. “Aha! I knew it! Riario would never behave badly in Rome! You’re not Riario, you are Sinner!”

“Not remotely true!” Riario squinted and rubbed his red eyes. “It just was a long way and my eyes became bloodshot because of all that strong headwind.”

“Really? Then answer quickly and without thinking. How many of us occupy this room?”

“One!” Riario blurted out. “Dammit…”

“Which’s exactly the answer I expected,” Leonardo concluded sternly.

Riario turned sulky, but then his face broadened out into an incisive smile.

“Leo, hey, Leo, listen… If you don’t invite me in I’ll start to behave badly here and you’ll have to bury dead bodies for one more week. Or even for two weeks.” 

But Leonardo wasn’t so easy to intimidate.

“If you start to behave badly here I’ll chain you to the pillar again and feed you with nothing but grapes,” he countered.

Riario had to give this argument some serious thought. After the last time he had felt nauseated for a month, not only of grapes, but even of grappa and basically everything that started with G.

“Okay,” he gave in reluctantly. “I’ll try and behave not very badly.”

“Are you saying that we’ll be burying dead bodies not for a week, but three days?” Leonardo asked.

“Maybe you’ll even manage to fit it in two,” Riario conceded magnanimously.

“Okay, come in.” Leonardo stepped aside. “Go and have some sleep now. If we’re lucky there’s a possibility we’ll do without any dead bodies at all.”

***  


The next morning wasn’t good. A migraine told Riario that yesterday he’d been drinking continuously and copiously. But his head retorted that… His head didn’t retort. It was empty apart from an echo which was rolling from one wall of his cranium to the other and responding softly, “f*ck-f*ck-f*ck” to any thought that happened to wander in there.

Riario picked up some blurred item of clothing from the floor, put it on, fiddled with its laces and went downstairs, swaying a bit. Da Vinci, outrageously chipper and agile as a Peruvian squirrel high on coca leaves, rushed to him and looked into his face.  

“Huh, it looks like it is you,” he said.

“Personally I doubt it,” Riario mumbled and elaborated, responding to the other’s raised eyebrow, “Perhaps it’s not me, but my headache.”

“Now it’s you for sure,” da Vinci concluded with relief.

“What were we doing yesterday?” Riario collapsed on the chair and lay on the tabletop.

“Talking about dead bodies mostly.” Da Vinci poured some water into a mug and added a few little leaves to it. “Here. Mint. And take this, too.”

Riario stared at a heavy copper pestle mistrustfully.

“What am I supposed to do with it? Lobotomy?”

“Zo would approve your idea if he were here,” da Vinci snorted. “But not exactly. Press it to the sore spot. I read that copper is able to absorb pain. Let’s check if it’s true.”

“You and your experiments,” Riario grumbled. He was trying to figure out where his sore spot was: ideally he needed to roll the pestle into a thin sheet and wrap it around his whole head.  

As a compromise, he had to move it from his forehead to both temples alternately. To his genuine surprise, after a quarter of an hour of these maneuvers and two mugs of pleasantly cool water his headache subsided. 

“Thank you,” he said, relieved, and added quite improvidently, “I owe you one.”

A bright flash of light illuminated the room. Riario glanced at the window: perhaps there was a thunderstorm coming. The morning sky was bright and clear. It turned out that it wasn’t a bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky, but da Vinci’s blazing eyes. Riario squirmed a bit.

“Talking about experiments,” da Vinci remarked casually. “I just wanted to borrow something from you.”

“Well,” Riario said carefully. “If this something is not my immortal soul, then I guess…”

“I need your seed,” da Vinci fired off.

“Pardon me, my what?” Riario blinked. “What do you mean by seed?”

“As far as you don’t look like an apricot and don’t even bear much resemblance to a mandrake, that doesn’t leave us with many variants of interpretation.” Da Vinci pressed something smooth and cold into his hands.

Riario stared at a little glass cup.

“I’m currently researching bodily fluids,” da Vinci explained. “You know, blood, saliva and this kind of thing.”

“Your own ‘kind of thing’ is not enough?” Riario enquired.

“To develop a full-fledged research I need a variety of samples.” The unhealthy little light (or rather quite a hellfire flame) of a natural scientist flashed in da Vinci’s eyes again. “Do you begrudge it?”

 “Masturbation is a sin,” Riario uttered piously. “That’s why I’m absolutely not going to…”

Da Vinci didn’t seem upset by his statement in a most suspicious manner.

“Oh, if that’s a problem, you don’t actually have to do anything.” He grabbed Riario by the elbow and dragged him from the table. “No worries, I’ll deal with the sin on my own.”

On the way to a wide low bench Riario decided that masturbation was probably not such a grave sin… No big deal… But it was too late. Da Vinci pushed him on the bench and was currently making short skillful work of undoing the lacing of his trousers.  

Aha, the blurred item of clothing was trousers after all.

“But I…” Riario started.

“And you lie still and hold the cup.”

“But…”

“Yesterday you tried to kick down my door with a horse, so you owe me at least a favor and at most a new door.” He stopped for a moment and stabbed Riario at the chest with his finger. “Have you got a door on you now?”

 “Of course I haven’t,” Riario answered, totally confused. “But…”

“A favor then,” da Vinci cut short and jerked the count’s trousers towards himself.

“I haven’t got a door.” Riario tried to catch the escaping waistband with his free hand. “But I can…”

“You can hold the cup.” Da Vinci slapped his hand away. “Just relax and think about how much use you can be for science. Science won’t forget you.”

“I don’t know about science not forgetting me, but I won’t forget science for sure,” Riario muttered. He gave up, leaned his body back on the bench, put the unblessed cup on his stomach and started thinking about the Vatican.

However, da Vinci got down to business with such enthusiasm that very soon Riario’s thoughts took a really indecent direction. The Vatican wouldn’t approve. He had to stop thinking about the Vatican and start thinking about Florence instead – it’d probably seen worse.   

 “Hem…” da Vinci muttered under his breath. “What if we do this…”

“This” turned out to be soft suspicious clinking and even softer and more suspicious gurgling, after which Riario involuntarily – like REALLY involuntarily – remembered the court physician named Saltaformaggio. This highly learned and equally ancient specimen had been living in the Papal palace for many years and all these years he’d remained unfailingly faithful to exclusively two methods of treatment. He was genuinely convinced that where bloodletting didn’t help the situation could be saved with a clyster. All other methods of treatment weren’t to be trusted. Or perhaps he didn’t even suspect their very existence. Whatever the case, thus far Riario had managed to wriggle out of such treatment – both by using whatever objects had been available for self-defense (including his sword, jars with leeches and antique vases) and by hasty tactical retreat through the Vatican’s secret tunnels. However, it seemed that there was really something of a physician about da Vinci… something like morbid eagerness to shove his fingers into places not designated for that purpose.

“Remove. Them. Immediately,” Riario ordered in his best threatening voice.

For some reason his best threatening voice didn’t sound convincing enough for da Vinci. Perhaps, the intended impression demanded a more appropriate setting.

“Let’s accelerate the process a bit,” da Vinci commented serenely. “Come on, you’re going to like it.”

“But I…”

“You hold the cup.”

 Riario’s fingers locked on the poor vessel with enough force to shatter it into pieces.

“I will hold it, but do you know you’re to be burnt at the stake for this?”

“Ah, yeah, they told me.”

He sounded disappointingly unconcerned. Even more disappointing was the fact that so far it was Riario who felt on fire. In spots and metaphorically, but still it was a bitter disappointment.  

Ultimately offended by da Vinci and his own treacherous body, he started thinking about Italy studiously. Then about Florence. Then about the particular part of Florence, specifically about madam Singh’s establishment where da Vinci would be perfectly able to make a little extra money when he wasn’t busy with painting and looking for trouble. Then Riario’s thoughts started getting so confused and jumbled that he even forgot which sector of Hell he was going to bode for da Vinci – the third ring of the seventh circle or the first ditch of the eighth.

   Distracted by the attempts to remember and roaring of blood in his ears (or rather the scanty drops which hadn’t migrated southward yet), he didn’t manage to make out da Vinci’s words.

“I’m holding your cup, holding it…” he mumbled.

Because what else could da Vinci possibly say?

And then da Vinci moved his fingers especially efficiently, then again – and all thoughts left Riario. Quite literally. Even the indecent ones. Even – terrible to admit – that he was obliged to hold the cup.

When Riario regained the ability to see and think clearly again, he levered himself up with elbows and saw that da Vinci was puttering around his work table with a very contented look. It must be assumed that his precious cup hadn’t been harmed and something had even got into it. 

 _Precisely ‘something’_ , Riario thought with displeasure, sat up and began cleaning his stomach and trousers with a cloth which happened to conveniently lie near the bench.

This cloth suspiciously resembled someone’s dress shirt, but Riario pretended he hadn’t noticed.

“Thank you very much for the sample!” da Vinci said brightly.

“You’re welcome,” Riario muttered distractedly and – if only because not all his blood had returned to his brain yet – added unwisely, “Anytime.”

The room became menacingly quiet. Riario diverted his attention from lacing his trousers and raised his eyes slowly. Da Vinci was standing right in front of him – with his eyes blazing and…

And two more cups.

“Erm…” Riario said.

“Saliva and urine.” Da Vinci handed both cups to him. “If it's not too much trouble.”

“But…”

“And it isn’t,” da Vinci continued, “because yesterday not only did you try to kick down my door with a horse, but you also threatened to behave badly and slaughter half of Florence. Have you got half of Florence on you now?”

“Of course I haven’t,” Riario mumbled. “But I…”

“It’s even easier,” da Vinci reassured him. “First you should think about a lemon and then about running water. And most importantly…”

“I should hold the cups,” Riario sighed.

“Exactly.” Da Vinci gave him a smack on the shoulder. “You’re a delight to work with.”

Riario sighed again and trudged upstairs so that there, relatively in private, he could think about the Vatican, Florence, running water, lemons, samples, cups and certain crazy geniuses.

Solely for science, of course.

 

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> 'Clyster' is an archaic word for 'enema'.


End file.
